Update: This course is now ‘suspended’. Participants received this email February 2, at 4:17 pm (PST). “We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.”

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From DSC:There will be many more disasters I’m sure. But as with learning, failure is to be expected (some would say mandatory) and learning is messy. This is especially true when technological change and innovation are moving at ever-increasing speeds.

The questions that comes to my mind after reading this are:

We still need to experiment — but how do we experiment with MOOCs on a smaller scale?

How can we keep things manageable?

Can bloggers help in sharing what’s working and what’s not? (Like Debbie did.)

If you were to sum up the psychology of learning in three words, it would be ‘less is more’. –Donald Clark

In FrogDesign’s presentation on Design is Hacking How we Learn, slide #27 clearly shows where the emphasis of our learning efforts should be, and where organizations should place the most support and resources: practice..

From DSC:In the corporate world, my thought is to provide the training as to where and how employees can get/stay in the know — especially by encouraging the use and ownership of blogs, social media, and developing/leveraging their personal learning networks. But also to provide the infrastructure and tools — the plumbing if you will — to allow for people to quickly connect with each other and to easily share information with each other (i.e. to develop their own learning ecosystems). Formal classes won’t cut it. As Harold and other members of the Internet Alliance have long been saying, it’s about informallearning. (Speaking of his Internet Alliance colleagues, Charles Jennings recently discussed how the pace of change is affecting the corporate world big time; and, just as in higher ed, being able to adapt is key to staying relevant.)

As a relevant aside…my issue with my Master’s Program in Instructional Design for Online Learning was that there was too much emphasis on theory and not enough emphasis on practice.

This is Learning Without Frontiers
Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) is a global platform that facilitates the ongoing dialogue about the future of learning. LWF attracts an engaged and open-minded audience who are forward thinking, curious and receptive to new ideas and perspectives about education, teaching and learning. They are an international audience of thought leaders, policy makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and leading practitioners from across the education, digital media and technology sectors. They are education leaders, intellectuals, social and political theorists, artists, designers, futurists, architects, publishers, broadcasters, technologists, parents, teachers and learners. They come to ask the big questions, discuss the big challenges and seek to answer them by innovation, enterprise and an enduring optimism. http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com

What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online. There is no productive place in this conversation for exclusivity or anti-intellectualism. Those of us talking about digital pedagogy and digital humanities need to be engaging thoughtfully in discussions about online learning and open education. Those of us in higher ed. need to be engaging thoughtfully with K-12 teachers and administrators. And it’s especially important that we open our discussions of the future of education to students, who should both participate in and help to build their own learning spaces. Pedagogy needs to be at the center of all these discussions.

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I have no interest in debating the whether of online learning. That bird has most assuredly flown. What I’d like to do here is outline a pedagogy of online learning — not best practices, but points of departure to encourage a diversity of pedagogies.

Connected Learning “is an answer to three key shifts as society evolves from the industrial age of the 20th century and its one-size-fits-all factory approach to educating youth to a 21st century networked society.”

1) A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just-in-time.

2) A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. Learning happens best when it is rich in social connections, especially when it is peer-based and organized around learners’ interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.

3) A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are one node of many on a young person’s network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.

Can ICT redefine the way we learn in the Networked Society? Technology has enabled us to interact, innovate and share in whole new ways. This dynamic shift in mindset is creating profound change throughout our society. The Future of Learning looks at one part of that change, the potential to redefine how we learn and educate. Watch as we talk with world renowned experts and educators about its potential to shift away from traditional methods of learning based on memorization and repetition to more holistic approaches that focus on individual students’ needs and self expression.

When we take notes during a lecture, however, something amazing happens. As we write, we create spatial relationships between the pieces of information we’re recording. The region of the brain that handles spatial information is engaged and, by linking it with the verbal information the brain filters wheat from chaff.

Research bears this out. In a study of a lecture class, students who took notes remembered no more content than the students who didn’t take notes; the act of taking notes did not increase the amount of what they remembered. But the students who took notes remembered more key facts, those who merely listened remembered more or less random content from the lecture.

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Note taking isn’t the only way to help the brain recall important stuff. Other kinds of writing, such as scrawling ideas on a whiteboard or pencilling a reminder on a calendar, create a link between the spatial and verbal parts of our brains and strengthen how important information is stored in our brains.

More than 16 million U.S. children currently live in food insecure households, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). These families too often confront a painful choice—pay bills, provide shelter, or put food on the table. To address this increasing need, nonprofits, foundations, government, and corporations must work together to make sure more children have access to the safety net programs that can provide them with the food they need to thrive.

Research and Markets: The 2012 Battle for Dominance in the Digital Living Room Report: 400 Bn Households Worldwide to have some form of Smart TV by 2016
DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/55tgll/the_battle_for_dom) has announced the addition of the “The Battle for Dominance in the Digital Living Room” report to their offering. A growing number of devices are starting to connect television sets to the Internet allowing for the delivery of a wide variety of new entertainment services. The Battle for Dominance in the Digital Living Room looks at the battle to connect televsion sets in consumers’ homes to the Internet and the impact this will have on the media industry. The focus is on providing an introduction to the issues involved with connected TVs and a look at the baseline forecasts for connected households. Over 400 million households worldwide to have some form of Smart TV by 2016.

The old hierarchical vertical order of: channel – series – episode, seems to be in danger, letting the horizontal disorder take its place. What do you think broadcasters can do to serve people during this shift?

The TV channel is being challenged, first by VOD and now by internet based services. How do you think the TV channels’ role will evolve in the next 5 years? Will the traditional push-based model maintain its centrality or will users be looking for search-only and pull-based alternatives?

A new form of TV means new revenue models. Who do you think will finance the next successful TV show in 10 years and how? Will the new channels’ role generate new business models? How you imagine them?

To protect our brain from information overload we need to filter and recommendations are a form of filtering. How do you think people’s recommendations will shape the future role of TV channels in the next years to come?

Artificial Intelligence, Smart Agents and algorithms are directing us into a world of Adaptive User Interfaces capable of recognizing different users and provide them with an anticipated, personalized experience. How do you think the future TV will shape around people’s habits and tastes?

There is no silver bullet in the world of education that can be used to effectively teach everyone. In fact, if you were to get 100 instructional designers/teachers/professors/instructors/trainers in the same room, you will not be able to find anything close to a strong agreement on what constitutes the best and most effective learning theory as well as the practical implementations of applying that learning theory (even if we were to be talking about the same age range of students). In my Master’s work, I was looking for that silver bullet…but I never found one.

It is very difficult for a professor or a teacher to deliver truly personalized/customized learning to each student in their classroom:

How can a teacher consistently know and remember what motivates each particular student?

Because so much of learning depends upon prior learning, what “hooks” exist — per student — that he/she can use to hang new information on?

Then, what’s the most effective method of delivering the content for each particular student that might shift the content from their working memories to their long-term memories? (And in the process, do so in a way that develops a love for learning that will serve the student well over his lifetime)

What’s the best way to assess the learning for each student?

Which students cognitive loads are being eaten up due to the nervousness around being assessed?

What are the best methods of passing along those learnings onto the students’ future teachers’ for the students’ benefit?

In my estimation, the way we have things setup throughout most K-16 education, this is an impossible task. When there’s typically only 1-2 teachers trying to teach to 20-30 students at a time, how can this type of personalized instruction occur?

However, I believe digital learning and its surrounding tools/ecosystems hold enormous promise for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities. Such technologies will be able to learn where a student is at, how to motivate them, how fast to push them, and how they best progress through a type of content. Such tools will provide real-time, learning-related, diagnostic dashboards for professors or teachers to leverage in order to guide and optimize a student’s education.

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So I believe that the promise is there for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities available 24x7x365 — even though we aren’t completely there yet. But think of the power a teacher would have if he or she had IBM’s Watson AI-based analysis on each student at their disposal! A “guide on the side” using such diagnostic tools could be a ***potent*** ally for a student.*

As such, I see innovative approaches continuing to come to fruition that will harness the power of serious games, analytics, web-based learner profiles, and multimedia-based/interactive learning content. Eventually, a piece of this type of personalized education will enter in via the Smart/Connected TVs of our living rooms…but that’s a post I’m building out for another day in the near future.

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*Another hope I have here is that such technologies will
enable students to identify and pursue their passions.

Excerpt:Most striking were the differences in final achievement measures under the three conditions. Using the standard deviation (sigma) or the control (conventional) class, it was typically found that the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average of the control class (the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class). The average student under mastery learning was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class(the average mastery learning student was above 84% of the students in the control class).

Personalizing Learning in 2012 — The Student & Parent Point of View [infographic] — from Project Tomorrow
Excerpt from Anne’s posting:
This first report focuses on how today’s students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. That personalization centers around three student desires: including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The report share the unfiltered views of K-12 students and parents on these key trends and documents their aspirations for fully leveraging the technologies supporting these trends to transform their learning lives.

From DSC:Arguably, Sal Kahn has become the most famous, influential educator on the planet today — his videos are watched millions of times a day now. The question — which Eric Schmidt answers in the piece — I couldn’t help but ask was, “Why didn’t this type of innovation come from someone who was working in education at the time of their innovation?”

My thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter and her colleagues for passing along this resource.The tags/associated categories for this posting point out the relevant areas covered.

Also see:

Khan Academy: The future of education?
(CBS News) Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.

From DSC:A relevant graphic comes to mind with what Sal is trying to achieve with analytics:

i.e. Highly-effective diagnostic tools for the educators and trainers out there!

The Hip-Hop culture is one both traditional and dynamic, an approach or philosophy as much as a term connotative of the East Coast rap scene. And as Sam Seidel explains, it has the potential to inform re-imagining of how we learn.

We’re going to have a much closer look at this concept in the March of our iPad Edudemic Magazine. For a quick preface…